Spotlight: Daniel Kalla’s Rising Sun, Falling Shadow

I’m currently reading Daniel Kalla’s Rising Sun, Falling Shadow and I’m enjoying it. Since I’m working on an interview with Daniel, I thought I’d do a spotlight on his book, in case you or someone you know might be interested in reading this.Title: Rising Sun, Falling ShadowAuthor: Daniel KallaGenre: Historical FictionPublication Date: September 24th 2013

Synopsis: It’s 1943, and the Japanese war machine has swallowed up Shanghai,the once-thriving “Paris of the East,” upending life for its Chinesepopulation as well as the city’s thousands of American, British and officially stateless European residents. Newlyweds Dr. Franz Adler and his wife, Soon Yi (Sunny), struggle to keep the city’s only hospital for refugee Jews open, while Shanghai’s Allied citizens are interned in squalid camps outside the city.

The Japanese force 20,000 Jewish refugees, including the Adlers,to relocate to a one-square-kilometre area in the slums of the city—the Shanghai Ghetto. For those trapped inside, heat, starvation and disease are constant threats. Sunny, a Shanghai native desperate to defend her lifelong home, is tempted into the dangerous embrace of the local Resistance movement, while a mysterious Chinese man brought critically wounded to the hospital may represent an even greater threat. Meanwhile, as the tide of the war begins turning in the rest of the world, the local Nazis maintain a persistent, menacing interest in Shanghai’s Jewish population.

Rising Sun, Falling Shadow blends a rich portrait of a city under siege with medical drama, romance and the intrigue of Alan Furst’s Mission to Paris, showing us both the heroism and the treachery that can result when ordinary people find themselves faced with extraordinary dangers.